Day 2,135

I knew it would happen eventually but I never prepared myself to actually face the reality that the kids I teach have never seen, and will never see, the open sky. I knew that some day I'd have some bright eyed little thing asking about birds and clouds but I didn't think it'd be so soon.

We tell them the sky died and so we had to move underground away from the super hot sun that makes the whole world gross and sweaty. It was kinder than saying that the sky was somehow alive and we managed to kill it and now its rotting corpse is gently collapsing into the ground.

It's kinder to let them hear these stories and hope we'll figure out a way to get passed the dead sky and to the colonies on the moon and Mars... if they're still alive. Whatever's leaking from the dead thing we called the sky has completely blocked all inbound and outbound signals. We're sitting ducks.

And we're the luckier of many thousands of survivors. Up in our mountain in one of the thinner areas of the dead sky, where all that falls just slides to the valley below and the stench only reaches us when the wind blows in a certain way. Sure we're only this high up because the pus-like fluid the fallen parts secrete is toxic but we're alive for now.

We're alive and the sky is dead.

With any luck our air supply will outlast us but with more luck still, we may yet escape.